I think it's fair to say that Gary Gygax had a very thin skin when it came to criticisms of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game line, even when the criticisms weren't aimed at a book or module in which he had a hand. A good example of what I'm talking about can found in the "From the Sorceror's [sic] Scroll" column he penned for issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982). There, Gygax responds to criticism of Deities & Demigods.
Before getting into the substance of what Gygax says here, a little background. The "critical piece" referenced in the paragraph above appeared in issue #19 of Different Worlds (March 1982). It's a review written by Patrick Amory that ends by stating "Deities & Demigods [is] fit only for the trashcan." Gygax claims that he only heard about Amory's piece after "reading a letter of agreement" written by a "disgruntled ex-TSR game designer." This second letter appeared in issue #22 of Different Worlds (July 1982) and its author is Lawrence Schick, who served as the editor of Deities & Demigods.
If you follow the link to Schick's "letter of agreement," you'll see that it's both lengthy and thoughtful in its criticisms. Though he clearly disagreed with the direction James M. Ward took the book, he does not seem to bear any ill will toward the man he calls "a real nice guy." Likewise, that he "really liked the AD&D system and wanted the AD&D products to be the best possible." Schick's criticisms, for the most part, boil down wanting DDG to have closer to Cults of Prax in its approach. That's an absolutely fair criticism in my book, but I'd of course say that, since it's pretty close to my own opinion on the matter. Regardless, I don't think anything Schick wrote is worthy of the intemperate and petty response Gygax offers.
Sadly, Gygax doesn't stop there. He continues his verbal assault against "this capable and knowledgeable individual" in a very bizarre fashion.
Given Gygax's frequent and vociferous disavowals of the influence of Tolkien over his vision of AD&D, I think it's pretty rich of him to turn around and try to use the (admittedly true) lack of religion in Middle-earth as evidence that the kind of book Schick would have preferred is somehow inappropriate for the game line. His references to the works of Howard, Leiber, and De Camp and Pratt seems less disingenuous (and more in keeping with his pulp fantasy preferences), but I'm not sure it serves his original point. If anything, in his flailing attempt to deflect Schick's fair criticisms of Deities & Demigods, he comes close to suggesting a book about gods and religion is unnecessary for AD&D.
This line of attack is all the odder, because Gygax's own articles about the deities and demigods of his World of Greyhawk setting were all quite good and included many of the details that Schick wished to see. He even acknowledges this later in his response, adding that this is appropriate "because they are part of an actual campaign," while DDG was never intended as anything more than "raw material upon which to build a campaign." He then suggests that expecting Deities & Demigods to be more than that is tantamount to "want[ing] someone else to do all your creative thinking for you." What an odd – and condescending – thing to say!
In the end, I think Gygax would have been better off not saying anything at all. I can only assume the fact that Schick, a former TSR employee, publicly offered his own firsthand thoughts about the shortcomings of an AD&D volume stung. I can certainly understand his feelings and might well have felt similarly were I in his shoes. Nonetheless, his response seems disproportionate and, worse, small-minded. Compared to Dragon, Different Worlds had a very small circulation and I doubt that many people were unduly influenced by its negative review, assuming they even saw it. If anything, an immoderate tirade like this one might well have had a greater negative effect on potential buyers.
Well it was Gary. As good as some of his stuff was, he had a habit of presenting stupid opinions as fact and changing tack when the wind changed. He'd have felt right at home on some of today's social media.
ReplyDeleteYup. Dude has his own personal soapbox back then, now we're all like Gary and it's not looking good.
DeleteI remain, even after so many years, astonished at how people continue to hold the opinion that Tolkien did not include religion in the Lord of the Rings, while the truth is that the entire work is suffused with it. Moreso, even, it lives and breathes religion.
ReplyDeleteThe War of the Ring is literally the battle between Good (the forces of Eru Iluvatar, the Valar and Maiar, and their minions), and Evil (Sauron, the Devil's Captain, and his minions).
Gandalf is both angel and prophet. The magic of the elves is essentially divine will. Man and mortal existence cannot be saved except by the will of "God," i.e., Frodo's "failure" at the end and the grace of Eru playing out in the fall of Gollum, etc.
Religion is everywhere in LotR. Common trappings and ritual, no. But then, most folk believe religion is nothing more than ritualistic base orthopraxy, missing out completely on philosophical orthodoxy.
Religion is everywhere in LOTR the same way it is everywhere in Narnia. Contrast this with the Bible, where religion is everywhere in both philosophy AND practice. When describing a culture, the practice is relevant, and CULTURALLY all the LOTR human cultures and even the elven ones are basically atheists.
DeleteI would hardly say "atheist," since they acknowledge the existence of the Valar. It's true, though, that they have no apparent religious practice, apart from the Rangers of Ithilien looking to the West at mealtime.
DeleteKnave, that's as good a way as any to tell me you have not read Lord of the Rings without saying in so many words that you have not read Lord of the Rings...
DeleteIn addition to what I noted in the earlier comment, the elves sing hymns of praise to Elbereth; they are clearly not atheists.
DeleteI'm a little baffled about what kinds of ritual characters in LOTR might be expected to participate in when much of the time a bona fide demigod/archangel is sitting right there smoking a pipe and offering a mix of good advice and exasperated sarcasm. Not to mention the number of characters in the book who, it turns out, have hung out with deities and/or are related to deities by descent or marriage.
DeleteBesides which, as has already been mentioned, we have all these small nods to belief like songs praising Elbereth and Rangers looking West.
The Hobbits, it's true, appear to be a very secular people.
But Tolkien's work is set in a mythic age: what's ritual to people who have literally hung out with gods and are even continuing to encounter them over the course of the story? (Saruman, the Balrog, Radagast, and Sauron are all divine beings of the same or similar rank to Gandalf, the Eagles are a manifestation of divine thought/will, and Tom Bombadil is a genuine Cosmic Mystery of some sort.)
I'm also a little baffled. Do people think that all religious ritual has to look like a Catholic Mass? Hobbits have Parties, which are almost exact parallels of Pacific Northwest peoples' potlatches, a mix of religious ritual and economic centerpiece. Storytelling goes on there, transmitting an outline of the cosmological and ethical standards of the people. Admittedly, the one Party we see is a notably large and unusual one, and is done specifically to tease Bilbo's neighbors and acquaintances, but we are given to understand that the basic structure is well-known and understood among the Shirefolk.
DeleteThe Rohirrim practice the same drink-service ritual that can be seen in Beowulf, where a significant, important woman serves drink to the principals and guests in the hall (see, e.g., Lady With a Mead Cup by Michael Enright for a discussion of the religious significance of this rite).
And so on. There is plenty of religion and religious practice going on in LotR. It just isn't the highly-organized sort that seems to be the only kind that many modern, less religious people are familiar with.
I have, in fact, read Lord of the Rings (and listened to the BBC audio drama obsessively as a child), attended churches of several denominations regularly, and also know that Hobbit Parties are not based on potlatches (not least because potlatches vary wildly).
DeleteA cultural practice is not necessarily the same thing as a religious practice. The people of the Lord of the Rings generally do not invoke god, or gather to worship, or any of the other things that religions (and NOT just Christian or even Abrahamic ones) do. They do not sacrifice. They do not pray. They do not cast augurs, or any of a legion of other things. They, in short, don't act like they have a religion.
Contrast with the Iliad, for example. While also mythic, the Iliad has very direct relationships between the individual participants and the gods.
Also, given that Tolkien's mythology is almost explicitly Christian, expecting religious practice in LOTR to have at least some parallels to Christianity would be pretty reasonable.
What is a "cultural atheist"? Is this the opposite of Dawkins' "cultural Christian"? :)
ReplyDeleteJoking aside, I think that James Mishler & Simulated Knave have valid points. And to the OP, I agree that Gary's intemperate response probably did more damage than the silly review that led to it.
More to the point with the issue at hand, Gary's vituperation aside, both he and Lawrence have good and valid points from their points of view.
ReplyDeleteD&DG was released for AD&D as a typical generic supplement. It presents a very basic framework for DMs to add historical and literary deities to their campaigns. It does not provide exacting rituals and associated cultural trappings because at the time, that was not the kind of material TSR was producing.
As I commented in the Verbosh post, at the time a lot of published material was provided as a framework for the DM to build upon using their own imagination, not as an end all be all infodump on specific game elements.
Gary was right in this respect, in that this was what he wanted to provide the readers.
Lawrence was also right from his point of view that he wanted more, something more detailed like Cults of Prax. That might be what he'd wanted, but that's not what D&DG was intended to do.
So they are speaking at cross points.
A perfect example of the utility of D&DG as it was presented is in the gods of the Forgotten Realms (which were inspired from Gods, Demi-Gods, and Heroes, true, but one is merely a revision of the other).
Ed took the material presented, mixed and matched from the pantheons, and made something his own, using his own imagination and creativity. That's something that really is not at all as easy if you are given the level of detail as you get from Prax, or Gary's later Greyhawk deity entries.
The more definitive the presentation, the less malleable the materials, and the less imagination can be applied. Sure, you could always drop Waha the Butcher into the myths and legends of the Wolf and Tiger Tribes of the Flanaess, but you'd have to make significant changes to both the cultures and the deity to make it all fit.
I for one am glad I was given tool kits to build upon, not "Words from on High" to constrain my imagination and fulfill others visions.
While perfectly true, I think this somewhat misses Schick's point. As I read his letter, he's lamenting the DDG's approach to deities, not its level of detail. Instead of talking about what deities might expect from their worshippers, and especially their clerics, or the role clerics play in a society, the DDG was basically a monster book on steroids. That encourages looking at gods as just more things to kill, rather than beings that shape society in important ways (as you point out that Eru and the Valar shape human and elven society in Tolkien's works).
DeleteIt's certainly true that Cults of Prax and Gary's Greyhawk deities are hard to adapt because they're culturally specific, but real-world pantheons are also culturally specific. The DDG strips out much of that specificity, which is why Greenwood could make his syncretistic group of deities work for the Forgotten Realms, but I'd say his real creativity shows in how he made the temples of various gods influential in the societies of the Realms. In other words, he took gods from Ward's work and treated them as Schick recommends. This is not less arduous than adapting Waha for the Wolf and Tiger Nomads.
D&DG was merely a new edition of GDG&H. That book was indeed used as little more than a monster book on steroids. Most of the players I knew BITD also used D&DG the same way. Those who built on it to create realistic religions in their campaign were, in my experience, in the minority. As I mention in another post in this thread, the players in those days were mostly inspired by Conan &etc., as Gary notes, which meant that gods were to be fought, or arm wrestled, and such.
DeleteThe time when fantasy RPG gods were to be considered ineffable and unbeatable was yet in the future, at least for D&D.
Regarding Ed's work, I believe it is easier, and more liberating to one's own imagination, to build up from a clean framework than to deconstruct an existing design, boil it down to the essentials, and then build up from there, still influenced by the cruft that came before.
There are those who, upon playing in the Realms, had no idea that once upon a time the gods thereof were "borrowed" from D&DG, until they were shown the Dragon Magazine wherein Ed laid out his actual process god by god. That transformation would be a lot harder for something already as fully realized as the gods in Prax.
Point taken about building up from a clean framework, but what framework does DDG actually provide? Other than names and spheres of influence (which could come equally well from a dictionary of mythology), what did it give Greenwood? He seems to have done the lion's share of the creative work himself. More significantly, he seems to have done what Schick hoped the DDG would help and encourage others to do.
DeleteBetween the deity entries in the pantheon section, the pantheon details therein, and the clerical details listings in the back, you get a very solid introduction to each deity. Remember, there was no Internet back then, and finding anything more detailed on old religions other than Bullfinch's Mythology in your local library was difficult, if not impossible in some places.
DeleteSo again, and especially for those with no experience with myths and legends, this was good enough a framework on which to hang your own imagination.
Lawrence was coming from the "been there done that" position not only of a college educated person but also of an expert in designing and adapting his own myths and legends. Which, it should be noted, that he and Tom Moldvay used GDG&H in much that same way for the Known World in their early days in gaming, so you'd think he'd have had some empathy for those who were just starting. He was, at that stage in his own design art, far beyond what was being offered with the new D&DG. It's like a gourmand ordering a Big Mac and complaining that it does not taste like steak...
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DeleteAgain, the issue here is that Lawrence had moved on in his ideals of what a game should be in both design and play. There's also some obvious bitterness from the editorial struggles he notes during the development of the book. He clearly wanted to move it more in a Prax direction, while Jim and Gary obviously preferred it remain more true to OD&D styles of GDG&H.
DeleteThat Lawrence was at one time, previously, aligned with that treatment can be seen from the work he and Tom Moldvay did on their Known World campaign. But thereafter, with experience, Lawrence moved on.
Underneath Gygax's fly-off-the-handle rhetoric, he does (perhaps) have a point worth considering. I think he brings up Tolkien, Howard, Leiber, etc. because he'd claim that D&D simulates books rather than life. Therefore one should look at the way gods are handled in swords & sorcery fiction rather than in real-world cultures. I say "I think" because it's difficult to know what Gygax intends once he starts ranting.
ReplyDeleteIt is disingenuous to state that religion does not have to be an important part of the game, when said game includes "Cleric" as one of the original three classes available.
ReplyDeleteI think here he is discussing the fact that the trappings of religion do not come into play. The first cleric in Blackmoor held his ministry at the "Church of the Facts of Life." In the early Greyhawk campaign, names of deities were simply something for clergy to pray to and others to curse by. The same was said for most early D&D and AD&D campaigns. Religion, if anything, was little more than flavor text, at best it was a side to join along the Law versus Chaos axis.
DeleteIt was really RuneQuest that started bringing religion as such into actual play. In D&D it started gaining traction as more DMs --and as TSR -- started detailing their campaigns more in depth.
The real push was with Dragonlance, where the actions of the gods became rather central to the story. The attention to religion grew from there through the novels, and the broader shift in fantasy literature spurred by the Dragonlance novels, for, as Gary mentioned, the gods in classic fantasy were either to be ignored or avoided if possible, or fought if needful.
Quoth Conan, "I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply." -- Queen of the Black Coast
It seems that in Gygax's view gods are important but religion is not. An OD&D cleric is not necessarily a priest, despite how the class has developed through the years.
DeleteExactly. If you read the stories that Gary lists, priests in the literature were little more than magic-users with funnier hats. The trappings and even the canon and ethos of the religions never entered into the mix. Even though Gary transformed Dave's Van Helsing to a Crusading Cleric, the trappings still never mattered. Window dressing and flavor text.
DeleteD&DG added a bit more to enable a game to have a whiff of heathenism or paganism, but not much more than that. And if, in your campaign, you wanted to have deities immanent and slayable, as in the classic literature, you were given the stats to do so...
It’s pretty rich that Gary chides Schick for being someone who wants the creative part done for him, when I have enough AD&D modules on my bookshelf to make it bow. And what are those, if not adventures - published by TSR - meant to alleviate one from the pressure of having to come up with everything? I suspect Gary’s sight often didn’t exceed the bridge of his own nose. He himself created a whole campaign world and lands and gods and whatnot, but not every DM has that kind of time or OCD. But if he can do it, why can’t you? Moreover, I think the criticism is fair in that, for the most part, DDG doesn’t tell you much about the worship of the gods, and it’s those worshippers that PCs are much more likely to encounter. Knowing what a priestess of Lolth does and their stats would be far more useful than knowing what level the spider goddess is in Magic-User.
ReplyDelete"Knowing what a priestess of Lolth does and their stats would be far more useful than knowing what level the spider goddess is in Magic-User."
DeleteYes, I remember this coming up in grade school.
ME: You aren't supposed to fight the gods.
Friend: Then why do they have hit points?
Gygax could also get petty about people being too creative and homebrewing their D&D-derived rule systems, as this blog has featured before. I think he developed an ego problem in TSR's Golden Age that often interfered with his good sense.
DeleteInterestingly, DDG does actually have some good, if rather sparse, information of the sort I'd want (I too also would prefer less deific statblocks and more info on using their worshippers in the game), but it's shoved into Appendix 3 for some reason. It's got information that frankly should be in the main entries, things like clerical raiment and holy days and types of sacrifices.
ReplyDeleteMeh. Just more evidence that Gygax was frequently a petty, hypocritical jackass, as if we needed more of that. The original review (not Schick's, which is pretty much spot on) is too harsh, but only marginally so. D&DG has just barely enough useful content in the form of mythic heroes and monsters that aren't deities to save it from being trash - and who wants to throw out that lovely Otus cover anyway?
ReplyDeleteTrue! Of the core four, I think D&DG has the best art. Otus was born to illustrate the Cthulhu Mythos.
DeleteIn fact, here's the ranking from best to worst, imho:
1. D&DG
2. PHB
3. MM
4, DMG
It is a very well-illustrated book, especially for its day. Quite fond of Jeff Dee's contributions myself, most or all of which have modern versions on his Deviant Art page.
DeleteAgree! Also, Roslof's Finnish and Greek Mythos, his Wild Hunt, Japanese samurai, and full page illustration of Thor! And Jaquays' work for Nehwon. Great stuff!
DeleteSomeone should come up with a timeline for Gygax and place such comments on the timeline. Everything should be BC (before he did coke in Hollywood) and AD (after dumped by TSR). It might be provide enlightening context from time to time.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of coke, if you haven't seen it already look up Seth Skorkowsky's joke youtube video on the creation of the Beholder sometime.
Delete